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Then why even use Linux? It is so easy to just be in the Windows world, where the NSA can spy on you and you have to pay the same company every couple years to get the latest versions of the same software. Where if you don't like the network traffic algorithm, you kind of have to deal with it because the whole OS is a black box.

Same can be said of gpus - oh, your hardware is old. So we're not supporting it anymore. Have fun! Or, a new API comes out - like opencl - oh hey, yeah, we're a competitor, we're not going to support it. Or maybe we are going to do software crippling of certain hardware parts to make larger margins with the same silicon. Such an easy way to raise profits, and if the drivers are blobs and undocumented, hey, not like you can do anything about it right?

Or your parts don't work with non-Android kernels. Because our driver is a big fat blob of who knows what running on your cpu. But hey, its convenient, so why care? Or more appropriately, its convenient until it isn't, at which point you are absolutely fucked.

First of all there is no Black or White situation for me. I like open-source software but I will not make my life harder just to support it.

Secondly, Nvidia binary drivers are free and as long as they are free I DONT CARE if they are open or proprietary.

Would you pay for a "open" but not "free of charge" driver? Personally not...

I don't pay for my OS and I don't pay for my drivers. Open or not its OK for me. I don't have security concerns about Nvidia. I believe Linux kernel is more possible to have a backdoor than Nvidia binary driver.

If I had an 8600GT I would be able to play Wargame European Escalation. With my Radeon 2600 PRO I can't!

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First of all there is no Black or White situation for me. I like open-source software but I will not make my life harder just to support it.

Secondly, Nvidia binary drivers are free and as long as they are free I DONT CARE if they are open or proprietary.

Would you pay for a "open" but not "free of charge" driver? Personally not...

Nvidia blob is not free, it is freeware. Freeware means proprietary with EULA that allows free distribution only under conditions. So it is not even free to distribute, only if you follow restrictions in EULA.
There is huge power behind "care", because you still "care" about product features/price and the "care" we understand stretches beyond features/price of current product.

And if company has consumed major intellectual and financial base with consumers having no care outside of "features/price", this company will be capable to produce cards at very low price per unit and will cut features / dictate just the price to beat the concurrence that has much higher entry barrier.
You will start "caring" when Nvidia starts cutting OpenGL features, because they want it, like they did in the past. But there will be no alternative, and any possible alternative will be immediately cared of by price reduction even below the cost of production!

Intel and AMD are rebuilding the whole OpenGL and kernel driver stack under open license, it is similar to rewriting the whole infrastructure from scratch. This is why I care about GPL, as the whole limitation is due to proprietary actions, not-caring about license, in the past by developers (Directx worked a little better, so why care about OpenGL?)

Nvidia is to GPU market like windumbs to OS market. If you don't care beyond "feature/price" you are doomed to complying and repeating the whole opensource "crusade" in feature catch-up over and over.

Maybe that guy on reddit is wrong with the explanation(?), but I can only say, I don't see any tearing with kwin and vsync set to full screen repainting (on ivy bridge + x.org 1.14), but with kwin + xrender compositing I see horrible tearing.

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As much as I love to throw sunshine and lollipops NVIDIA's way... I have to admit that I feel that the driver quality has been regressing a lot in recent years. It seems like every driver version introduces some new esoteric bug and they don't really give the impression that they care much to fix it.

The codebase must be a complete trainwreck if simply touching one area makes the whole thing fall apart.

Performance is kinda good... but only when the driver kinda works. So I can get 1,000 fps in L4D2 until the game hangs in the safe room. That's the sort of thing that doesn't show up in the benchmarks.

Exactly my experience but sadly your post will be drowned in wave of nvbots claiming that magic NVIDIA driver has no issues

I was wondering the same thing so duckduckgo'd it and got "Causing deprivation, lack, or loss." From that I assumed it was some kind of pun, but then again maybe it wasn't intentional.

"Privativo" (ending with "o") is the spanish translation for "propietary" in the context of free software. Somewhere "propietary" is bad translated in this context as "propietario", wich means "owner" (correct for other context), so "privativo" is recommended in spanish.

"Privative" is a valid english translation of "privativo" and maybe people use it to avoid confusion to spanish speakers. Maybe you also read the term "libre software". "Free" have two meanings, free as in freedom, and free as in free beer. In spanish we have "gratis" for "free as in free beer" and "libre" for "free as in freedom", so lot of people is using that spanglish term "libre software" to avoid confusion (Moreover, in spanish the correct term is very similar: "software libre").

ONTOPIC HERE:

To go intopic, I have a Radeon 6850 card wich I bought because of AMD helping to make open source drivers. The wait was long, but well, now libre<--->privative drivers are near parity. I suffered seeing perfomance loss, but enjoyed the libre one's support of compositing and kernel-mode-setting. Next card will be an AMD one for sure, the parity is near. I like games, but I'm not a gamer, more a gnulinuxer and I have a Winbugs partition for games that doesn't work at GNU/Linux.